


MAG 70 Remix: Cool! The Book of the Dead

by ephriam_gadsby



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Am only 70 episodes in forgive, I have no idea what is going on, MAG070, Would anyone else quite like to inherit the book of the dead?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:47:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29402916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ephriam_gadsby/pseuds/ephriam_gadsby
Summary: I have only just discovered the Magnus Archives & have listened to 70 episodes in 2021, so obviously I am obsessed and also have no idea what is actually going on....This fic is the result of me listening to MAG 70 and running out of friends to say: 'well honestly, I'd quite like to inherit The Book of the Dead, is that weird?! That's not that weird is it?' to.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	MAG 70 Remix: Cool! The Book of the Dead

Statement of Mark Harlow, regarding inheritance of an unusual book from Masato Murray. Statement taken direct from subject on 9th September 2020.  
Statement begins.

Hey! Thanks for getting in contact. I absolutely would have been in touch earlier- but you guys don’t have much of an online presence, and this morning was literally the first time I’d heard of you. If you’re going to tell me you could have helped us solve this one really easily I’m going to be real pissed- or actually, with the benefit of knowing what happened in the end - maybe I won’t be. It was kind of fun, in a super messed up way. 

Anyway, sorry, let me get started properly. This is all very extensively documented in the blog and the YouTube series, of course, but you said you’re recording this onto tape? I really want this told as much as I can, so very happy to tell the story again.

My name is Mark Harlow. I work for Birmingham City Council. It’s a really boring, steady job which to be honest I don’t like to talk about much, but it’s relevant here, because it was through this job that I came into possession of The Book of Doom. That’s not it’s actual name, of course, and it’s actually kind of terrible branding when I’m trying to get people to take this seriously, but I’ve called it that so many times this Summer I can’t stop calling it that now. 

It started this July. I forget what stage of lockdown we were in at that point exactly, but I mean they’re all basically the same aren’t they, in terms of how they affect day-to-day living? I was working from home, which I didn’t mind so much. Probably the worst thing about it was that my three closest friends- Steve, Ben and Kiara had all been furloughed since May or whenever and were very keen to let me know how they were enjoying their abundance of free time. I wasn’t always sure I envied them- my job was boring but at least I wasn’t going to be made unemployed any time soon, and it gave me a sense of routine, but they were very determined to rub their lack of work in my face, and I guess fair play to them.

So, I got this weird call in July from my manager, who told me that Masato Murray had died. I didn’t know really how to respond. I vaguely remembered Masato from the office- when I first started he had been assigned to show me the ropes a bit as a sort of informal ‘buddy’. We hadn’t got on- I was just fresh out of school, and still instinctively enjoyed annoying a certain kind of prim and proper adult who liked to tell me what to do. So I’m pretty sure he thought I was a little shit.   
He’d left the office quite soon after though and I can’t say I’ve thought about him in the intervening seven years. 

So when my manager told me Masoto had left me something in his Will, my first instinct was that it must have been a mistake. But no, apparently not. Cut to a week later and there on my doorstep, courtesy of this guy who had, I guess, hated me a lot more than I remembered, was The Book of Doom. 

It was an ancient looking, thick black book, faded and worn away at the corners. It was kind of like one of those big guestbooks they have in old fancy hotels by the sea. It felt really good and weighty, and it smelt sort of like you’d expect- like old paper and leather and time and dust, but kind of - sharper too, like sweat. It didn’t have a title- the front cover was just unbroken dark, mottled leather, and inside it didn’t have a title page either. 

The first words in it were a quote:

“Life is a current which cannot be fought. It is a march with one destination. You cannot cease your step, nor move your course, to one that skirts the journey’s termination.”

And below it, in a faded blue ink was a handwritten message:

“YOU HAVE ALREADY READ TOO MUCH”

I must admit, by this point I was already in love with the thing. Getting a creepy old book off a dead ex-colleague might not be everyone’s idea of a good time, but I was really bored of staying in my flat and, honestly, I was very down for a summertime of being cursed by a book. That sounds really flippant- but honestly I’ve always been the kind of nerd who secretly hoped there was some kind of magic in the world. Evil or good, magic was magic. 

The next page was in Latin, beautifully handwritten. I Google Translated it with that app you can use to photograph street signs on holiday, and it turned out to be this incredibly gruesome description of a monk’s untimely death falling under a cart, the wounds he received leading to the life slowly and painfully draining from his body, his crushed windpipe leaving him unable to cry out and reveal his location to the other monks while they searched for him. The date given was summer 1450.   
I flipped through the rest of the book still sitting on the floor in the hallway of my flat. Each page was written in a different style- the languages changing from Latin to French to versions of Old and Middle English. Some were harder to translate because they were so untidily written, and each described in vivid, graphic detail, the violent, often lingering, death of one person. 

The last pages were where it gets actually interesting. The second to last page was a typed entry- size 12 calibri font on what looked like modern, cheap white printer paper, though seamlessly bound into the book alongside the rest of the pages. It was an account of the death of my old office buddy Masato. He had fallen down the stairs near St Pauls, it said. An agonising fall, that broke his skull, and he could- according to the book, anyway, feel everything that happened to him up until the moment he died, unable to move in a pool of his own blood in full view of what tourists London had left earlier this year. 

And, as you might have guessed - even if you hadn’t watched our excellent videos on this topic, which I do recommend- the last page was an account of my very own death. It took place 14 years and a couple of months from the day I received the book, and in it I drowned slowly and in predictable agonising pain on a beach holiday.   
It was clear that this was some Necronomicon level shit. My first reaction to reading about my own gruesome death, I must admit was something approaching total glee. I’ve always been the kind of person who would want to know when they were going to die. Granted it wasn’t the nicest way to go- but after the few minutes of suffering you’re dead, right, so it didn’t really bother me that much. And 14 years, though again not what I’d have chosen, felt like a really long time even if it was inescapable. It was kind of - motivating in a way. 

Anyway, I must have been sitting there on the floor by the door looking at the book for straight up almost two hours because I realised I was actually late to join in our weekly Zoom D&D call me and Steve, Ben and Kiara had planned. 

I joined the call, and told them about the book right away, holding it up to the camera. They were pretty easy to convince to believe me. We’re all kind of cosmic horror nuts and we’ve had extensive conversations over beers in the past about how if we ever did come across any dark secrets of the universe, we’d support each other to find out more about them and not go mad. It had just been a joke at the time, of course, but it meant we were actually weirdly prepared for just such a situation. And I’ve told you they were on furlough already- they honestly must have been way more bored than they were letting on. 

We started the blog on it that evening - or Kiara did. She is probably the most organised of us, and her day job is working in logistics for restaurants, so I think the lack of ordering people and ingredients around eight hours a day had left some kind of resultant need in her to organise us. She was our usual DM too, but she called that off right after I told them about the book so that we could prioritise our time better and really focus on it. I think that’s an exact quote. 

The blog was just us writing down what our approach to stopping the thing was- and being snarky to each other. It was clear that there were rules involved- the deaths were all violent, all painful, and happened anywhere between 20 years and a few months apart. And obviously all were written up in the person who had died’s language.   
Steve was the one to point out the obvious, and said that I should just not go to Barbados on the day I was meant to die there. 

I absolutely scoffed at him. Of course it wasn’t going to be that easy. You can never escape your fate right- that’s been the staple right, back to Oedipus and probably before. But I mean even so, it did seem like the obvious thing not to go, so said I guessed I would try not to go and I’d probably end up there anyway somehow.   
Shortly after this conversation, Kiara got me to read out the exact description of my death so she could take it down for the first blog post. When I turned back to the back page of the book and saw the text had changed, that was I think the first time I got a proper chill of fear from the whole situation, a proper sickening chill, rather than the kind of fear you pay to get at a theme park.

The new death that was described for me on the page was still horrendously unpleasant, of course, but now it took place only 11 years in the future and I would be crushed under a falling statue in a church. Kind of Hot Fuzz style. 

Honestly, once the initial stab of fear had subsided though, this was even cooler than before. This book was properly evil- it felt like it was deliberately fucking with me. It was a good job, as Kiara pointed out dryly, that I was probably more screwed up in my reaction to it than it was expecting. 

We worked it out pretty fast. It was quite obvious really- every time I made a conscious decision not to do the thing that led to my death, the text changed and the date moved forward. That information came at a cost- we moved my death forward until it was only five years in the future by the time we were sure about that- it jumped forward in seemingly random increments, sometimes only a few days, sometimes months or years at a time. 

It never changed while I was watching the text- or it really, really tried not to. However, I had the bright idea to set up a camera directly facing it. I used an old phone I had, and it was clear the book didn’t like it- it managed to wait until I walked in front of the camera to change once, and the second time it changed in the moment the camera re-focused on the text as night fell and the light changed. But eventually Steve got two new, better cameras ordered off Amazon facing it in his spare room with the lights constant and that was our first victory. We managed to get on camera the date of my impending death, actually switching! 

It was a very cool moment. This must have been almost the end of July by this point and we had this niche online following to the blog. It was taking up loads of my time, but my holiday to Italy had been cancelled by the pandemic, so to be honest I was happy to use my leave to debate with my friends if it was me looking at it, or thinking about it, or someone else looking at it, or me being afraid of it, or whatever else it was that was the trigger to actually changing the text. 

The actual change itself wasn’t that spectacular. The text was simply different from one frame to the next. The next death it chose for me that first time we got it on camera was a mere two years in the future and was particularly vicious- a lot of writing about just how horrible I was going to find it being paralysed and unable to move while a truck crushed the breath from me. I got a lot of sympathy online and a lot of being taken the piss out of by Steve and Kiara and Ben which made it bearable. 

It’s weird that I don’t think the book ever actually got me properly down. I bubbled-up with Ben who also lived by himself once that was allowed and I did a lot of reevaluating my life kind of stuff, but it was largely in a positive way that just meant I treated myself to baths and takeaways and played all of the new Assassins Creed and didn’t really worry about the future. 

We tried to destroy the book too, of course. Other people had tried to, we thought, because it had these little scorch marks on it. But Kiara got us organised to really properly give it a go- we managed to get into a crematorium and ask this guy to give it the full fire and brimstone treatment. It didn’t work. The crematorium guy raked it out cool and just slightly more blackened at the edges than it had been before, and was an avid follower of the blog after that! I was weirdly pleased when it survived the fire. It would have been kind of an anticlimax if it had been that easy. 

So when we figured out it was my intention that brought the date forward, it was actually quite easy to hold it in once place. After we got it on film I simply bought train tickets down to Southhampton which was the location of my current eventual demise and I resolved to go there and meet my fate. After that it didn’t jump around. It didn’t really get sincerity I think. 

Kiara somehow also managed to get us access to the CCTV of Masato’s death- I won’t go into how. It was a really grim, horrible thing to watch of course, but it concluded for us something we’d been thinking about to do with the other deaths. The book seemed to know what was going to happen externally- e.g. what time a train would run on what line or if a gas main was going to explode, but it didn’t seem to cause these things, it just put you in the path of them. 

Masato was definitely pushed down those stairs. You can see it clear as day on the CCTV. One minute he’s walking and the next, bam, it’s like his legs just crumple and give out on him. So we figured, the book just has two powers: 1) to know about the external environment, and 2) to nudge the unwilling person named within it to fuck up in such a way that they are aligned with that environment so that they die horribly and painfully. 

I mean woohoo right? That doesn’t sound like all that much. But it enabled us to come up with a plan to defeat the thing. Here’s how we did it. 

First, I put all of my affairs in order, little as they were. I got a Solicitor (over Zoom of course) and got my Will written. And then I made extensive and detailed plans to kill myself the following week. I won’t go into the details, but basically I planned to do it in a way that was the most comfortable way possible- the exact opposite of what the book wanted. I got a special bottle of fancy whisky to drink before and even a cigar. Ben talked me out of acquiring a silk robe too. 

Like I said, the book didn’t really get sincerity, but just in case I tried my best to believe like I was going to go through with it. I went overkill on it, really, wrote the date on my Calendar and circled it, and called up my landlord to cancel my rental contract. It took a while for the Book of Doom to bite, but I was sealing the letter I’d written to my family trying to explain the situation just in case it did go wrong when I got a ding ding dinging series of notifications from the live feed of the book that signalled the text had changed.   
And oh had it changed! It obviously did not want me to die in a way that it hadn’t set out for me. The new death listed was for the next morning. It was quite simple actually - I would just be going for a walk on my way to meet Steve in the local Cemetery which - ironically enough was our closest green space- and I would trip and fall down an open manhole and die in torturous paroxysms of pain etc etc. 

It was really thrillingly scary seeing it finally that close. I didn’t speak to anyone about it, but steeled myself to get up and do exactly as the book had set out the next morning. That was all part of the plan. It was quite hard to not just let myself think at all about trying to get out of it, but of course that would have screwed everything up. Instead, I watched some of that Netflix show about those people who keep tigers and I went to sleep. It felt, I guess, partly bone-chillingly terrifying and bleak, but the news right then was full of so many people dying without anyone, and certainly without having a chance to look death in the eye and try to tell it to fuck off, so honestly I managed on the whole not to be too self-pitying about it. 

It was a beautiful day, the next day, the fated day of my death. Blue sky horizon to horizon and the real scent of summer in the air, even in central Birmingham. It felt kind of like a good day to die. 

As I walked along, Ben and Steve and Kiara came to join me, so we were all walking side by side. We didn’t talk, as we walked down the street towards the drain that I was predestined to fall down. It was a nice dark, wide hole, no workmen around to be seen and very flimsily constructed plastic barriers surrounding it- all in all an excellent choice by the Book of Doom. 

As we got level to it, Steve, Ben and Kiara all came to my left so they were standing between me and it, and as my legs gave out underneath me and I pitched sideways, just like Masato’s had- a horrible feeling but totally vindicating our theory- they grabbed me firmly by the shoulders and torso and kept me on the pavement. 

It wasn’t quite that easy. The book certainly didn’t give up without a fight. I’ve watched it back on the cameras we had set up and it looks, frankly ridiculous. I look like a puppet that has had its strings cut, or like a big pale fish out of water, flopping heavily around as I try to pitch myself bodily down the hole. There was a moment, Kiara said, when it felt genuinely like they were going to lose the bizarre fight, because I had seemed just so desperate to tear them aside with no worry for my own self-preservation.

But luckily, the mysteriously absent workmen were actually only having breakfast in their van, and at the noise of four people tussling over their exposed pit, they made their way leisurely back, and after a moment of baffled staring at us, and some rather rude shouting from Steve in their direction, they put down their takeaway coffees and quickly closed up the yawning abyss so it was just pavement once more. That was the point at which the book gave up and I dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes, head still hitting the floor firmly enough to give me concussion. 

And that’s really all there is to it. When we got out of the hospital and filed a probably too honest police report, the last page of the book was blank. No one else’s name has appeared. 

Because we never got that far I’m not all that sure how the book acquired its new victims. I think it required it managing to kill the person named in it. I am sorry for Masato. I guess I’ll never know why he passed it on to me- if he was compelled to choose someone and for some reason my name came to mind, or maybe I did just really, really get to him those couple of weeks seven years ago.

So yeah. I guess I’m not entirely sure if the book is going to be quiet forever, or if it’s just biding its time, but either way for now it seems to be done with me. It was a really wild summer!


End file.
